Serviio

What is the most comfortable way to use the recent Chromecast with Google TV as a media player for Serviio 2.1 content?

How do you configure the Chromecast?
Do you run an App on the Chromecast and, if so, which app?
How do you ensure that Serviio identifies the Chromecast (+app?) properly and selects an appropriate profile?
How do you write that proper profile?

Ideally, if using a media player app, I would like to always communicate with said app, w/o having to explicitly start the app first, and if I start, say, chromecasting from my phone, the chromecast session should temporarily override the player app.

But, if Chromecast+app can't be set up quite as comfortably as that, I can live with "almost as good" or "whatever works".

I don't have a Chromecast, but I do have several players that run on Android, as does the CC. I use Kodi as my primary player, but there are many other player options in the Google Play store. VLC is a great player with a terrible UI, but it doesn't require any configuration to use it with Serviio. It will recognize a uPnP player on your network automatically. Setting up Kodi or MrMC is a bit time consuming, but both are great players.

As far as profiles, most Android players can handle almost anything without needing transcoding. The new Onn 4K player I just bought to test doesn't support bitstreaming the lossless audio codecs, so I'll likely write a short profile for it. My guess is the Chromecast will perform almost identical to this particular player, so unless you have Dolby TrueHD or DTS-Master Audio on your media it should work fine. If you do have media with those codecs, depending on mow the media was created there might be a basic Dolby Digital or DTS track you can change to. When I create the profile, I'll likely make it transcode all audio to Dolby Digital, just to keep things simple.